movies: the libertine

There are two Johnny Depp movies out at present... the Pirates sequel and The Libertine... one of these has had a truckload of publicity and coverage, the other hasn't... which isn't that surprising really... Dead Man's Chest is a big "summer" blockbuster... Libertine is less than half a step away from being an arthouse movie.

But I have to say, I very much enjoyed it.

What little I know about Johnny's character, the Earl of Rochester comes from Alan Cumming's performance in Plunkett and Macleane (at least I'm assuming they're supposed to be the same person)... but honestly, not only couldn't the two movies be any further apart, but the two portrayals are poles apart too. Interestingly, some of the characters and a tiny bit of the plot for The Libertine is shared with another movie I'm quite fond of, Stage Beauty... technically you could watch the three movies together as part of some weird, non-literal trilogy...

Getting back to The Libertine though... this is once again proof that Johnny Depp can play any part, not matter what, and you just believe him... from the opening dialogue straight to camera (which drew me in so completely, especially after that stunning lack of any kind of music or opening score) right until the last moment of the film, you just buy Johnny as Rochester...

What I didn't expect was the rather stellar and interrelated cast... including Tom Hollander and Jack Davenport, who also star with Johnny in the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie... and the ever lovely John Malkovich, who I could seriously just watch reading the phone book for two hours...

If the film has any flaw, it's the fact that it's occasionally to clever and too artistic for it's own good... I kept being distracted by the recurring notion that the entire film was shot with natural light for the most part and the night time scenes lit entirely with candles (ala Kubrick's Barry Lyndon), which did turn out to be mostly true... the entire thing is tinted with a slight sepia hue and the film shows visible grain all the way through... neither of which actually bothered me, I have to say, I stopped seeing both the hue and the grain after the first twenty minutes or so... but there were some odd camera movements, and compositions that did throw my eye from time to time... and an entire sequence at the end of the movie where the camera was intentionally allowed to fall out of focus as the camera moved before sharpening up again which very much threw me out of the moment.

What I did love was that it wasn't the perfect, clean costume drama that we usually see... this movie was very dirty and very real but also very engaging.

yani's rating: 3 drunken poets out of 5